With Blackouts and Twitter, Web Flexes Its Muscle (original) (raw)

Technology|With Twitter, Blackouts and Demonstrations, Web Flexes Its Muscle

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/technology/protests-of-antipiracy-bills-unite-web.html

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Nadine Wolf at a protest in Manhattan at the office of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.Credit...Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Jan. 18, 2012

The Web buzzed with protests large and small on Wednesday as the tech industry rallied against Congressional legislation to curb Internet piracy.

Some sites blacked out — among them, the English-language Wikipedia, though it was possible to access the encyclopedia through several clever workarounds — while others, including Google and Craigslist, draped their pages with information about the bills, or restricted access.

Many start-ups quickly cobbled together tech solutions to support their cause. HelloFax, for example, created a tool that let people send their representatives faxes voicing their opinions through the Web.

The effort was an unusual orchestration that began gathering steam online late Tuesday night and escalated early Wednesday morning, eventually whipping the Web into a frenzy.

Google said 4.5 million people signed its online petition to Congress, voicing displeasure at the legislation; Twitter said more than two million posts on the subject flowed through the site by early afternoon, nearly four times as many as usual.

Engine Advocacy, a service that helps people call their local members of Congress, said that as many as 2,000 a second were trying – demand so heavy that many of the calls could not be completed. And Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that oversees Wikipedia, said four million people used its blacked-out site to look up contact information for their local representative.

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